By Larry Kim
August 08, 2012
Posted In: Paid Search Marketing
Comments: 13
When it comes to search marketing, SEO’s are from Mars and PPC’s are from Venus.Just over a week following the release of our War on Free Clicks infographic, dozens of whiny SEO’s have come out of the woodwork with ludicrous sob stories about how they purportedly tried and failed to get PPC to work for them and/or their client. Continue Reading

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9 comments

Okay, so this feels a bit like link bait but I completely disagree.
A really smart search marketer understands and can implement both. Don't get me on about how many times I've had to suggest negative keywords to a client who has a PPC agency, or ask why their PPC agency hasn't implemented remarketing yet. Mind you, I started out in PPC so perhaps I have a stronger bias.
But I digress, because it really comes down to those who put in the work and understand how to get results. Those people excel in SEO and PPC. It's about expertise and effort, not about the channel you apply it to.

It's hard not to have some cross over. Most of us at one point have done both but I also think if you really want to excel at something you need to be kept in the loop. I myself don't do very much PPC because of this.

AJ, very good points. I'd argue that an expertise in one usually carries over fairly well into the other. We live in an era of "best practices" and content. If you can create a high-value, content rich page for SEO, you should be able to do a decent job at PPC as well. My only point would be education or interest in ppc or seo would be the difference in quality.

lack of nuance, mass judgement towards an industry while doing SEO yourself for Wordwatch. If you don't believe in SEO why do you even bother writing these articles and doing that crazy internal linking on your site? Just spend that time and money in PPC. You will tell me that is a limited / short sighted argument but it's got about the same caliber as many of those you're using in your articles lately.
ps: I do find ppc useful and I'm not an SEO knight, I just think both have their pros and cons.

Hi All - thanks for these great comments. The point of my article is more about highlighting some common differences in the PPC and SEO mindsets, and how those differences can quite sometimes lead to misunderstandings and also failure. It wasn't intended to be about the virtues of PPC vs. SEO.